That Far Garden
by Empatheia
Summary: -Shiemi- There's a reason the Amahara Garden is so elusive: everyone looks in all the wrong places.


**A/N:** Just a little crack theory of mine I'm quite fond of.

**x.x.x**

_**That Far Garden**_

**x.x.x**

_Thick as thieves the last of leaves_

_In the winter sun_

_Holding fast__,__ this freezing branch_

_Is home to us_

_Step, step right over the line_

_And onto borrowed time_

- A Fine Frenzy, "Borrowed Time"

**x.x.x**

Shiemi is seventeen when the nightmares begin.

Nightmares, because they leave her aching and broken when they pass, clawing back through the dark in search of something lost and unremembered. Nightmares, because the cruelest dreams are the best dreams, because even though she can't remember these ones she knows that whatever she's leaving behind when she wakes up is something her soul desperately wants. Nightmares, because the world looks greyer for days after she has one.

She is an exorcist now, a middle–second class tamer with an entire greenhouse of growing spirits ready to answer her call. Ni is still her favourite, her faithful and unfailing companion, but he is also the general of her own little army now.

After the third nightmare, she summons a thin, twisted little brown spirit she's named Shuu. He is the soul of valerian. In the springtime, he blossoms with tiny pink flowers, just the loveliest little thing. It is midwinter now. He is a gnarled knot of roots, hunched and glaring.

"Help me," she says.

"I cannot," he replies.

"Why?"

"I open the gate for dreams. I do not record them as they pass."

Shiemi withers a little. There are no other spirits in her little battalion with power over dreams. She does not know any exorcists who care for them, either, as they are not useful in battle or particularly reliable as a medium for the second sight.

As the winter passes and the world begins to creak back to life, the dreams begin to come more often. On the spring equinox, she falls asleep at lunchtime and sleeps straight through the night and most of the next morning, and when she wakes up there is a wild expansive thunder in her chest she finally recognizes as yearning. The yawning chasm between her ribs moans as an illusory wind rushes through it, leaving her hungry for something she cannot name.

The next day, she goes home to visit her mother, and her mother teaches her how to make a sachet to put under her pillow which will close and lock the dreaming doors and keep all the wonders and horrors she cannot remember behind them.

Shiemi makes one, and sleeps with it for a night, and feels a bit better in the morning. So she makes several more, then reconsiders and sews them all into a pillow, a mighty green fortress to protect her heart.

It works until the solstice. Then the doors shudder and crack and the peculiar horizontal gravity of dreams pulls her in and she is lost again.

When she wakes up this time, she remembers something, dimly: endless shadowed green, and a winding stone path, and a unutterably sweet feeling of homecoming. Waking up feels like exile and ruin.

Shiemi puts the pillow away in a drawer and stands defenceless before the doors the next night. They open without sound and drag her in, and the sweet drowning sense of belonging swallows her, and she tries with all her might to record everything but cannot catch anything in her sunlight fingers. She weeps when she feels the dream collapsing, and weeps harder when she wakes up to the humid oppression of a moonless midsummer night.

Her friends begin to notice her distraction, but she reassures them that she is fine, she's just been studying so hard for her next rank examination her eyes are sagging, so never mind those dark smudges or the weary slope of her shoulders. She's fine. How could she add to their worry? They all have such great burdens to bear already, and she is their friend.

The nightmares continue.

Nothing changes until the autumnal equinox. When she lies down then, a nameless feeling rises in her, equal parts anticipation and fear. Outside, she can hear and feel the leaves withering and the winds sharpening, the ground getting colder, all living things drawing themselves inwards for the protection they will need through their long impending sleep. Fall. A time of ending, a time of loss and quiet melancholy.

Somehow she knows that this time will be different.

She is right.

Beyond the dreaming doors, she finds the stone path, and long swaths of browning grass. Great trees rise from their edges, glorious with autumnal crowns, the detritus of their summer heydays coating the ground beneath them. Here and there a stark bare branch stands out against the deep evening sky. And between and around, growing and dying in a tumultuous profusion of scent and colour, lies a garden.

Shiemi sinks to her knees before a long, narrow plot of lavender and lets her flooding tears water it.

She knows this garden. How could she not? The memory and legend of it run in her blood, down through the centuries from the beginning. She had only known about her grandmother, but now through the deep gloaming she can see all the way back, the thread of iridescent green winding its way up through history away into the dark distance. This garden is hers. Her family planted it, and it is their calling to care for it, and now because her mother has unknowingly refused the duty, it is her turn.

She knows where she is, where this garden grows, and why.

Rin's mother was right all along.

_It's too early_, she thinks. She's still so young, and has so many friends to protect and love, and so much to see.

Without her, the garden tells her, it will wither and rot and become a half-dead wild thing. Her friends are strong. They can protect each other. The garden has no one but her.

It curves around her, surrounding her with gentle branches and damp leaves, not to smother but to beg.

She asks it to give her the winter, to let her set things right while it sleeps. Reluctantly, it lets her go, uneasily satisfied with her promise of spring. (A time of awakening, of returning, of rising suns and lengthening days and birth and growth; every garden's birthday.)

Shiemi wakes up and remembers everything. She dresses carefully, taking her time in order to keep her calm, and goes to work.

She can't tell them yet. She'll wait for February, or even March, until it's too late for them to stop her.

Rin will be the hardest, she knows. He can be so convincing, and he will not want to let her go any more than she will want to leave him, even if she tells him she's coming back. And he will be so afraid when she tells him where her garden grows… beyond the world mirror, below the sea of faces, in the twilight realm where all his fears reside). Hopefully, Yukio will be there. Yukio will understand. He will explain it to them when her words fail her.

Autumn winds down, and the Amahara Garden prepares to sleep. Come spring, it will call its caretaker, and she will walk through the dreaming doors and follow the stone path to its end, and she will not come back until winter falls again.

Shiemi takes a deep breath and straightens her back. She is the Moriyama heir. This is her preordained fate, and she can only welcome it.

Today the wind begins to sing of snow.

**X.x.X**

**A/N:** Yes, I think the Amahara Garden is in Hell. Nothing that beautiful can be as simple as it seems.


End file.
